I’m one of those Christmas people. I am not a Christmas cheer evangelist; I am not trying to convince you to be thrilled that Christmas is approaching. It’s more the reverse: throughout the long year with its long days I am usually very outwardly disposed, going places and seeing people and responding to all kinds of spontaneity (summer is notorious for this), but by the time Christmas approaches the days are short and the nights are long and cold and collars rise around looped scarves which consume the ears and train the eyes straight ahead. The quintessential winter activity is walking home alone in the dark, lost in thought. When Christmas is on the way, I have nothing but time to think to myself, and I imagine this would be a very grim period (being consumed with thoughts and whatnot) were it not for Christmas itself.  If I turned inward and found anything other than the gleam of hope — Christ, yes, but first the sparkle of the Star of Bethlehem — the season would just be winter, the annual performance of death.

But because of Christmas, there are lights strewn through the black of winter — the multicolored bulbs on the houses of my suburban Texan neighborhood glow in my thoughts, and at night when I glimpse streetlights and neon shop signs in Providence through the blur of tears resisting cold wind, I can see them again. Christmas is about hope, and anticipation: there’s an intentional buildup, and a kind of trepidation, though the payoff is assured and absolute. If nobody had ever written any other verse about Christmas than ‘God and sinners reconciled’ it would have been enough. But I’m glad they wrote others.

And it seems so much of what we do at Christmas is done with such a tremendous investment of hope. You travel with the hope that everything will go well, not only that you will be safely delivered, but that this will be the year your family doesn’t do that thing they will most certainly do. And you buy gifts, send cards, all with the incredible hope that they will be accepted at the least, at most received well. All of these exchanges and movements of stuff and people, all this shifting around — always it is accompanied by the timid hope that something good will come of it.

This is why people detest Christmas. All of the objects and cultural products routinely excoriated for their obnoxiousness — Christmas trees (messy; pagan; environmentally unfriendly); Christmas songs (bad; boring; pagan); Christmas gifts (expensive; pagan; materialistic) — are recruited as symbols of disappointment. Charlie Brown’s humble tree at first appears this way, but in an answer to Christmastime cynicism, it turns out alright. Not perfect, not very much majestic, but just right. This is how Christmas ought to be, and all kinds of media about Christmas tell the same essential Christmas story: the lowly and meek will more than suffice. The problem is just that it doesn’t always turn out that way.

The holidays produce expectations that go unfulfilled; lonely people feel lonelier amidst demands for cheer, commercialism and the immediacy of ownership are swapped for faith, and everything comes out feeling commodified and artificial. Every year, the same op-eds about materialism arise drearily, informing us that the Christmas-industrial-complex is a scam. Sure, but everything is. Where are the daily op-eds about the commodification of everything, about the fact that all personality, all sentiment, all relationships are not only expressed but experienced through consumption? You’re not really you in any unique sense until you’ve differentiated your iPhone case from hers: if I can’t tell you’re a certain kind of person by the jackets you buy, are you really that kind of person at all? But the low murmur about the crisis of commodification (which has been going strong for many decades now) doesn’t crescendo into a shrill keen until Christmas, and there’s a good reason for that: Christmas isn’t just a good example, it’s an offensive one. While iPhones never promised not to sink to the level of base salesmanship, Christmas did. Christmas gets slammed for its collusion with consumerism precisely because we hope for so much more from it. Christmas should be better than this.

And it is, even if we’re not. Hope is bound up in the essence of Christmas, it’s the bright beaming star in the middle of the story. If there weren’t a glimmer of hope to be frustrated, then there wouldn’t be such remonstration, every single year, against the disappointment that can slip in between unhappy relatives and lovers and friends. If there has been a failure in presenting the message of Christmas, it’s this: Christmas does deliver on the hope it promises, in that God and sinners are, as a result of this event, reconciled. And all the wrongs that come in between, all the pain and suffering and loneliness and brutality that passes on earth, will also be soothed in the fulfillment of this promise.

So for Christians fearful over the seemingly rapid disengagement of Christianity from culture, Christmas haters should be a comforting sign, not an unsettling one. People who are intensely bothered by Christmas have seen a hope in it that has gone frustrated, sometimes over and over again. This is what makes the holidays such an excellent time to reach out to people who are suffering, and offer to suffer-with. It is right to remember that not everyone has somebody now, and that it is especially painful not to, precisely because the world can seem to shimmer, especially on snowy evenings just a few weeks before the day itself, with a sense of electric expectation. It’s painful when the moment passes unannounced and impotent.

But I think the struggle to reach out to people who suffer especially at Christmas is one of the things that makes the season perfect. You are their hope, and they are yours. People who suffer need others to relieve them, and in the relief of suffering we touch the wounds of Christ. And I don’t mind all the glitter and the shine; I know it can all seem like a spectacle, and that spectacles always lend themselves to the inauthentic and artificial. But to me it all commends the sparkle in the dark, the hope that even in such vulgar, commercialized times can’t quite be extracted from the heart of Christmas. So I am one of those Christmas people, I was born on St. Nicholas’ feast day, and I’m all into the crazy kaleidoscopic brightness of it all, and the hope, every year.